As we head into what we hope is a terrific Fall weekend Funeral Director Daily brings you three features as well as other articles on the world of death care.

Our features include an article, that you can read here, about the Netherlands and the first person put in a “Mushroom Coffin” last week that is designed to turn the body into compost.  The “Living Cocoon, as inventor Bob Henrikx calls it, is designed as the first living coffin and, as Hendrikx says,  takes the human corpse  and returns it to the cycle of life.

On that same thought process of new products and features, we bring you this article from Crunchbase.  It tells us that it is not only death care inventors that have been busy, but death care investors as well.  The article goes into some of the 26 companies, in the death care space, that venture and seed backers have put capital into in the last 3 years.

According to the article the investments come amid, what they call, a societal shift around end-of-life planning burials, and memorial services.  Crunchbase mentions that the companies have taken in approximately $117 million in investor money to date.

Finally, we have a short report from Yahoo dealing with the United Kingdom’s Co-op, which operate the Funeral Co-op as one of their ventures.  The Co-op, in total reported first =-half 2020 revenues up 7.6% and profits up 35% as their grocery stores and funeral homes did a good business during the pandemic period.

In the article that you can read here, the company reports that their funeral call volume was up 22% to 59,000 during the first six months of 2020, which included the high death pandemic months of the 2nd Quarter.  The funeral care division says that their revenue was up only 3.5% though because of what they described as 20,000 cases that they classified as “Simpler” services.  In essence, they were not unlike all other death care service providers that we cover who have, what we call “enough numbers” to get a national view.  The end result of all of those companies for the last quarter has been “higher numbers of cases offset by lower revenue from simpler services.”

More news from the world of Death Care:

• Funeral directors are part of the virus response.  The Eagle  (TX)
• Gravediggers speak out about horrifying conditions.  Vice.
• Finding a passion for community in mortuary science.  The Record & clarion (MI)
• Mortician fights for license, livelihood after virus scandal.  Associated Press.  Minneapolis Tribune.  (MN)